Lightning Source, Inc. has announced
an alliance with Holtzbrinck publishers—the U.S. publishing group that
includes St. Martin’s Press; Picador; Tor; Forge; Henry Holt; and
Farrar, Stratus & Giroux—to become Holtzbrinck’s primary provider of
a comprehensive suite of digital fulfillment services, including printing
and secure e-book delivery. In addition, Holtzbrinck’s worldwide publishers—such
as Pan Macmillan and Palgrave—will participate in this alliance.

“We’re tremendously excited to build a relationship with one of the
world’s largest and most respected publishers to offer a full complement
of end-to-end digital fulfillment services,” said Ed Marino, Lightning
Source’s president and CEO. “This new agreement will utilize our ability
to provide a one-stop digital solution for publishers around the world.”

“Lightning Source provides the infrastructure to usher a title through
its entire life cycle, from initial galleys through printing, as well as
secure e-book delivery in a variety of formats,” said John Sargent, president
of Holtzbrinck Publisher. “Lightning Source offers us the collaboration
we were looking for to take full advantage of the emerging technologies
in the growing digital publishing arena.”

Under the agreement, Lightning Source will provide print-on-demand,
short-run, and galley-printing services to Holtzbrinck, in addition to
e-book conversion, storage, and fulfillment services. The Lightning Source
business-to-business (B2B) model for both e-book and print-on-demand delivery
provides Holtzbrinck with the ability to sell books to nearly all e-tailers
and brick-and-mortar stores in a much more efficient manner. In addition,
Lightning Source allows Holtzbrinck to deliver its titles in a range of
e-book formats, thereby maximizing author exposure to the book-reading
consumer.

Holtzbrinck boasts one of the most diverse collections of titles in
the industry—ranging from commercial fiction to scholarly and reference
works—including such authors as Janet Evanovich, Robert Jordan, Robert
Ludlum, Salman Rushdie, Scott Turow, and Tom Wolfe. The alliance promises
to add at least 15,000 titles to Lightning Source’s growing digital library,
and, ultimately, give readers access to a wider selection of titles in
both traditional printed and electronic formats. Holtzbrinck publishers
is a U.S. subsidiary of Verlagsgruppe Georg Von Holtzbrinck, GmbH, based
in Stuttgart, Germany.

Lightning Source, Inc., a subsidiary of Ingram Industries, Inc., provides
a comprehensive suite of digital-fulfillment services. Lightning Source
stores books and other information electronically and delivers them on
demand in either traditional printed format or as e-books in response to
orders from booksellers, librarians, and publishers. According to the announcement,
Lightning Source has printed more than 1 million on-demand books for more
than 600 publishers around the world.